Event Detail

Fri Feb 14, 2014
60 Evans Hall
4:10–6 PM
Logic Colloquium
Sherrilyn Roush (UC Berkeley)
The Difference Between Knowledge and Understanding

In the classic Gettier problem, cases are imagined where a person has very good reasons to believe a proposition p, and p is true, but many people think the person still doesn’t have knowledge. I characterize what is missing in these cases probabilistically, as a failure of what I call relevance matching. Relevance matching is best interpreted as understanding why p is true, and it is deterministically related to but distinct from the tracking conditions that in my view define knowledge. This view of understanding makes it a simulation among your mental states of the dispositions of factors probabilistically relevant to p’s being true, and as such avoids requiring unrealistic information- and computation-intensive beliefs and inferences about why p is true in order to understand.